Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Nathaniel( 1804–64),was born at Salem, Mass., of a prominent Puritan family, which had spelled the name Hathorne and included a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, who figures as the accursed founder of The House of the Seven Gables. Nathaniel's father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in Dutch Guiana in 1808, leaving his widow to mourn him during a long life of eccentric seclusion, and this influenced her son's somber and solitary attitude. During his childhood, he read extensively in the poets and romancers, and spent an impressionable year at a remote Maine lake, after which he attended Bowdoin College, graduating in 1825. Returning to Salem, he began to write historical sketches and allegorical tales, dealing with moral conflicts in colonial New England.
In 1828 he published anonymously, at his own expense, an immature novel, Fanshawe, whose hero resembles the author at this period. The work went...
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